Yoram Hazony, Russell Kirk, and the Conservative Fascination with “Order”

“By contrast, Kirk insists that progressives are the real fools in thinking that unbridled reason alone can provide us with an adequate sense of meaning in the world.”

Introduction

The conservative theorist Russell Kirk once opined that a fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives is that the former ask “What ‘is’?” while the latter ask, “What does this mean?” Progressives from the Enlightenment onwards have consistently tried to use reason to show that many of the conceits we have about the world are predicated on shaky or even entirely self-serving reasoning. A key example is Voltaire, who spent his long life not just criticizing but, outright, lampooning religious and secular authorities. The influence of these figures was so prevalent that a “critical”—or what Michael Oakeshott might call “skeptical—approach to the world became integrally associated with intelligence. This became so much the case that just a century later, J.S Mill would ridicule the Conservatives as the “stupid” party, given their unreflective belief in traditional and religious ways of apprehending the world. By contrast, Kirk insists that progressives are the real fools in thinking that unbridled reason alone can provide us with an adequate sense of meaning in the world. Conservatives, from Burke onwards, recognized that while it may be impossible to give a fully rational defense of traditional knowledge and institutions, they nevertheless played a vital role in the world. This is because most people did not desire to be critical thinkers and ask what truly “is.” Instead, they believed they possessed enough instinctual wisdom to recognize that such would be an endless task, which would never allow a person to settle back into their world after having been so cognitively disrupted.

This has a strong relationship with a theoretical question that has been on the minds of many conservative or conservative-friendly commentators over the last few years: how to maintain or restore a collapsing sense of shared order. Pundits like Ben Shapiro claim that we shouldn’t be surprised that without society being organized by shared values, there is only disorder and “warfare.” Religious critics writing in First Things decry increasing disagreement on what constitutes a good life, how people should live, and so on. Underpinning these anxieties is a belief that unless society is committed to a shared meaning on “what matters,” as Derek Parfit would put it, there can only be cynical idolatry, at best—and warfare and conflict, at worst. Few have expressed these anxieties more eloquently than Yoram Hazony, who, in his essay “Conservative Rationalism Has Failed,” called on even atheistic or skeptical conservatives to embrace the religious heritage of their nations to restore a shared sense of meaning and order:

“I often speak to young men and women who say they are excited about ‘conservatism.’ Yet when the sabbath comes around, they have not the slightest intention of keeping the sabbath as their ancestors did for two or three thousand years, but happily tell me that they are headed for the mountains or the beach, or staying home ‘to finish up something for work.’ No doubt, many of these are atheists or agnostics, and this is perhaps not their own fault. But this absolves them of nothing. If they were conservatives, they would not simply shrug their shoulders and go off to the beach, saying, ‘Oh well, too bad I’m an atheist.’ A conservative says in his heart: My entire country is suffering terribly from having cut off its traditions at the roots. What can I do to revive these traditions, to make myself a more conservative person, to give honor to the ideas and way of life of my ancestors who brought me here (or of the nation that adopted me)? And is it not, perhaps, my own fault too that I know nothing of God, having given up the search for the wisdom and understanding of my ancestors as an adolescent? Perhaps it is my own fault, after all, if I seek to exercise my freedom by going to the seashore on the seventh day, rather than setting it aside as my ancestors did, as a day for reconnecting myself to the traditions of my nation and its God.”